LOS ANGELES — To its competitors, the Netflix takeover of comedy must have seemed nasty, brutish and quick.

In only a few years, the streaming giant has pushed aside HBO as the home of prestige stand-up and made Comedy Central seem like Comedy Marginal. By signing up A-listers (Dave Chappelle, Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock), turning rising talent into stars (Ali Wong and Hannah Gadsby) and radically expanding the volume of new content, Netflix has transformed the stand-up special into the bustling center of popular culture. How did it do it?

The cynical explanation, commonly heard in comedy circles, is that the service just outspent everyone else. But in rare, extensive interviews that explored that criticism as well as a controversy over pay equity, Lisa Nishimura, Netflix’s vice president of original documentary and comedy programming, and Robbie Praw, its director of original stand-up comedy, the most powerful gatekeepers in stand-up, tell a different story, one in which iconoclasm, new metrics and abiding faith in the algorithm disrupt the stale conventions of an industry.

Over dinner at an Italian restaurant last month, Ms. Nishimura, 47, projected casual charisma in jeans and glasses, shifting between comedy nerd chatter and Silicon Valley-speak. Mr. Praw, 37, warm but more cautious, sat next to her, listening in awe as she explained perhaps her greatest coup, persuading Mr. Chappelle to return to a national platform. She lingered on the image of seeing him after the Bafta Awards one year in London when a security guard who didn’t recognize him stopped him from entering a party. She introduced herself: “We’re heading to another party. Wanna go?”

He did, and years later, he joined her again, not only agreeing to release his first standup special in 13 years on Netflix, but also following that with three more in 2017. Bringing this reclusive star to Netflix solidified its dominant reputation. His pay for the package of shows was widely reported as $60 million. Netflix does not confirm salaries, but, asked how she determined what to offer him, Ms. Nishimura responded: “The way we do everything else,” she said. “We go into the data.”

The same impulse was evident over a decade earlier when Ms. Nishimura started working for Netflix, buying content of all kinds from companies other than major studios. After seeing how specials first shown on cable performed on Netflix, she developed a hunch that the common wisdom about the stand-up special — that it had a limited audience — was entirely wrong.

It was a fairly niche genre then; months went by without a major release. But when you made specials readily available, Ms. Nishimura noticed there was an enthusiastic untapped market. “We started to hear from artist and managers that they were feeling something almost instantly,” Ms. Nishimura said.

When Netflix started developing original content, Ms. Nishimura’s experience helped make the case to bet big on comedy. Now, 50 percent of its 130 million subscribers have watched a special in the last year, and a third of those viewers have watched three such shows.

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Ms. Nishimura persuaded Dave Chappelle to return to the stand-up special format, a coup for the executive.CreditMathieu Bitton/Netflix

Netflix currently releases about a special every week, and the frequency increased dramatically in fall 2016, not long after Ms. Nishimura brought on Mr. Praw, a comedy obsessive who was vice president at the Just for Laughs festival in Montreal and who, at Netflix, leads four employees constantly scouting new work. Their strategy is rooted in the belief that Netflix doesn’t need to choose between quality and quantity, that the eternal showbiz question of whether to go for mass or prestige is a false choice.

They can do both, their argument goes, because they not only have more data on what the audience wants — and, with their algorithm’s help, are better able to personalize the experience — but also their system of analyzing taste is more refined than that of others in the industry.

Unlike traditional media outlets, Netflix does not fixate on categories of age, gender or race. “We don’t pull demographic information because you would be in danger of imparting biases of what a 75-year-old Japanese grandmother would want to watch versus a 14-year-old kid from Ohio,” Ms. Nishimura said. “But there are moments in time when they are in the exact same taste cluster. We see it all the time.”

The Netflix system has more than 2,000 “taste clusters” that measure content by tone, timbre and feeling to predict what you will want to see when you log onto the site. Netflix places more emphasis on whether a show is uplifting, somber or redemptive than on genre or who the director is. But what do these new metrics say about comedy that the rest of us cannot see?

Netflix is famously tight-lipped about data. It won’t release audience information to the news media or comics, who would love to know who watches their specials to plan tours.

But the two executives will discuss some details. Mr. Praw said one of the many misconceptions he brought to Netflix was that there would be no overlap between fans of, say, Gabriel Iglesias’s broad comedy and Maria Bamford’s more cerebral standup. “What we discovered is that for some people that’s the case,” he said, “but for others, that assumption is wrong.”

Ms. Nishimura added that there was also a surprising overlap between viewers interested in Ms. Gadsby and “Wild Wild Country,” the documentary series about a cult leader. They are both popular, she said, among those drawn to explorations of the “human condition, what motivates people under pressure.”

Netflix may try to transcend the old categories, but now that it’s the biggest and most influential stand-up platform, it’s become a subject of intense scrutiny about issues of representation and pay equity.

Earlier this year, the African-American stand-up comic Mo’Nique called for a boycott of Netflix, accusing the streaming service of discriminating against black female comedians by paying less for their specials than their peers’. (She was offered half a million dollars.) On Twitter, Wanda Sykes, another seasoned African-American stand-up star, thanked her for speaking up and said she was also offended by the offer Netflix gave her, indicating it was less than $250,000. Mr. Praw said Mo’Nique added to an important conversation about pay equity, but that Netflix executives based their pay decision on the usual data: social metrics, touring. “There just wasn’t a deal to be made. We were disappointed, but the door is always open.”

Netflix had not produced any new hourlong stand-up shows by black women in 2017 or 2018 — although several have appeared in the service’s half-hour and 15-minute collections. When asked if Netflix has a responsibility to do better, Mr. Praw said: “I think we have a responsibility, but it’s also what our members want.”

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Ms. Nishimura said the breakout Hannah Gadsby show, “Nanette,” also appeals to fans of the documentary “Wild Wild Country”: Both explore “what motivates people under pressure.”CreditBen King/Netflix

The next day, Mr. Praw emailed to clarify his comments and in a follow-up conversation conceded that programming so few black women has been a failure. Since our discussion, Netflix has announced that Tiffany Haddish and Ms. Sykes will release specials through the service next year.

In comedy circles, the most common criticism of Netflix is that in releasing so many specials, it’s oversaturating the market, making it more difficult for comics who aren’t superstars to break out. But Mr. Praw rejects that argument. “We would never look at musicians and say let’s put out 10 albums this year,” Mr. Praw responded.

Then there’s the inevitable question of Louis C. K. Netflix canceled a deal with him after he admitted to sexual misconduct. But would the service have him back? After I posed the question — weeks before he returned to do a club set — Ms. Nishimura and Mr. Praw paused to reflect. This extended into a minute before a publicist interrupted, saying they wouldn’t be able to answer.

When asked if he’s worried about running out of A-list stars, Mr. Praw pointed to forthcoming specials by Ellen DeGeneres and Adam Sandler and remaining deals with Mr. Rock and Mr. Seinfeld.

The focus now, though, is on expanding the audience through new forms, like the 30- and 15-minute specials. (The second batch of what Netflix calls “The Comedy Lineup” was just released.)

Ms. Nishimura said she thought Netflix stand-up would soon get more competition. Comedy Central has shown signs of being more aggressive, recently signingAnthony Jeselnik to a deal and announcing a stand-up month in January with four new one-hour specials and a digital new-faces series.

Players like Disney and Apple are entering the streaming market. But it’s unclear if these outlets will spend tens of millions of dollars on stand-up. Asked if Netflix can continue to offer huge sums, Ms. Nishimura replied, “If we continue to grow the audience, we’re O.K.”

This may be partly why Netflix is putting a premium on the global market, recently hiring an Amsterdam-based executive to recruit international comics. Next year, the service will release 47 half-hour specials in seven different languages on the same day.

“When you look around the world, there’s stand-up markets all over the place where there weren’t 20 years ago,” Mr. Praw said. “Now there’s clubs in Korea.”

In this new venture, they may upend another bit of common wisdom — that comedy has trouble crossing borders. It wasn’t long ago when it seemed ridiculous that a DVD rental company would dominate American stand-up. The idea that it would take over the world hardly seems far-fetched.